National Development and Language Diversity

Samenvatting

Language diversity has been hypothesized to be a cause and a result of political and economic underdevelopment. Several mechanisms have been suggested for the hypothesized relationships in each direction of causation. The truth or falsity of these hypotheses is important for language planning and development planning, but hypothesis testing is usually hindered by problems in concept definition, relation specification, information acquisition, information loss, and causal inference. Information loss, which characterizes even good work in this area, is chosen as the problem most easily corrected. The correction is performed on the example of the relationship between language diversity, defined as the size of the largest native-language group in a country as a proportion of its population, and economic development, defined as the (logarithmically transformed) gross domestic product per capita of the country. The correction of information loss consists of: (1) discovering values of these two variables for countries omitted from standard sources and thus raising the n to 133, and (2) describing the joint distribution of the two variables not with a summary statistic but with a scatter plot. All ranges of economic development and language diversity combinations are exemplified by a substantial number of countries except for combinations of high development and low diversity. Many underdeveloped countries are linguistically uniform, but no highly developed countries have very high linguistic diversity. Methods for refining and further exploring this joint distribution are mentioned. The implication of the static relationship found in the scatter plot for dynamic hypotheses causally relating economic development and language diversity is discussed. Hypotheses predicting economic development without linguistic information are not disproved merely by the current absence of any developed, linguistically fragmented country, but this absence may itself discourage attempts to plan for development with diversity. 1 figure, 1 table. AA